


Avalanche

by HenryMercury



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), SPECTRE (2015)
Genre: Alternate Ending - SPECTRE, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Spectre Boss Madeleine Swann, The Pale Queen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-07 01:19:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5438189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HenryMercury/pseuds/HenryMercury
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"So this is your way of letting me know that the Pale Queen is back."</p><p>"Oh, you'd have found that out one way or another. This is my way of letting you know that it's <i>all your fault<i></i></i>."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Avalanche

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lunarclip](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunarclip/gifts).



Bond weaves through the darkened corridors, pistol at the ready. The rooms that open up on either side of him mock him with posters of his many ghosts; Silva's blondness, still strange when rendered in black and white; Vesper's keen eyes staring. He isn't sure whether they judge him or whether the judgment all issues from himself. He quite deliberately doesn't pause long enough to figure it out.

He finds Oberhauser at the end of the corridor, behind a wall of what is sure to be bulletproof glass. He doesn't test it with any gunfire, however, because of who is standing next to the newly scar-faced man. Because of who has a knife pressed against his throat. Because of who notes Bond's arrival and looks him in the eye as she moves that knife in a swift, certainly practiced motion. Blood spurts from Oberhauser's neck, spattering against the glass in front of Bond's face, and he almost flinches. Carotid artery. She's going for drama, then. This observation passes through his mind rather superficially. He feels clogged with all the re-evaluations the current situation is demanding of him: Oberhauser is dead. Madeleine is not an innocent.

Oberhauser struggles for a few seconds and then he is a sack of limp flesh in Madeleine's arms. Her hands drip red as she pushes him away, letting him thump unceremoniously onto the floor. He lies there, not yet dead, but unconscious and well on his way to staying that way permanently. The knife she used to kill him clatters down onto the stone too, the stickiness of it gathering dust. She walks, ever so calmly, over to a nondescript chair that stands close to the centre of the otherwise empty room around her. Behind the glass she looks to Bond like an attraction at a zoo. She looks very comfortable in the confined space, though, so he assumes the light filtering in from above represents her easy escape route.

 _He_ is the zoo attraction, then. Bond pounds his fists against the glass despite knowing they won't do any good.

Madeleine has donned the same gown she wore that night on the train—the same style and colour, if not the actual dress. A strange choice of outfit for a murder, but a potent reminder of the night they spent together. Yes; that must be why she's chosen it. Why she's chosen to slit Oberhauser's throat in front of him remains more of a mystery.

"James," she greets him with a twitch of the lips that's nothing like a smile. "Barging into my life once again. At least this time I am prepared for you."

"Prepared to do what, exactly?" Bond asks.

"Prepared to see you off before you can cause me any more trouble," she answers. "You know, I really did mean to leave this life. I extracted myself from the organisation and kept myself alive afterwards. Do you know how difficult that is, James? Nearly impossible, even for someone of my rank and skill. But I did it. And then you waltzed onto my mountaintop and decided to involve me again. The only reason I am still in London now is to make you regret that."

Bond catalogues the things he's learned so far from this encounter. Madeleine is part of Spectre. She... retired, for reasons he doesn't yet know. He'd known she was capable of killing a man but it chills him now to see how little aversion she has to soaking in a target's blood. And lastly, she's looking at him not like she wants to kiss him, but like she wants to make him suffer, if only for her own brief amusement.

"But you told me that you loved me." This thought presses at him and he allows it to crawl out of his mouth because acting hurt is one way to extract information. It _is_ acting, of course.

"Not the subtlest moment of my performance," Madeleine says airily. "I must say if I had to do it over that's a thing I'd change. But you still believed it."

She lifts her hands from her lap and he sees that she's holding another small knife. It glints as it catches a sliver of light. The sleek silver blade is quite easily camouflaged against the ice blue satin of her gown. The hem of the dress drapes over her legs, which are lazily crossed at the shins. Sharp-toed shoes poke out from underneath its hem. Heels that aren't called stilettos for no reason. Surrounded by rubble and covered in gore, she appears flawless, utterly unruffled. She holds herself so much like a queen that she transforms the rickety chair beneath her into a throne.

Some of the blood pooling on the floor edges its way up to the trailing hem of her dress, and the pale fabric soaks it in. Bond's eyes follow the river of dark red back to the cut throat of Oberhauser. The mortal wound is not particularly large. It is expertly done; cleaner than the cut across his right eye, and that much deadlier.

"I really do hate guns," Madeleine has tracked his gaze. "There's so much distance. Impersonality. Pulling a trigger doesn't require half the conviction that pushing a knife does. I personally like knives much better." She strokes the flat of the blade. "And you, James, you and your meddling reawakened my conviction."

"Your conviction that _what_?" he asks. It's a gamble that frequently pays off, assuming that an adversary will boast, or at least share information they believe will harm him. The latter seems more likely to work out in the situation at hand.

"Oh, that someone needs to remove power from the hands of men like you," she says. "I mean, _really_. You show up, leading assassins to me, and then have the audacity to demand that I trust you. You think that protecting me from danger _you_ put me in makes you a hero. You think that some connection to my estranged father entitles you to step in and watch over me against my own will?—and you somehow think that the role of a, what, a surrogate father? involves sleeping with me?"

The cool repose she has exuded until now heats somewhat with the friction of the speedy outpouring of words. When she pauses at the end, she collects herself, leans back in her chair where she has leaned forward in her anger.

"I made a promise to your father. I thought I was doing the right thing."

"That's just the problem, isn't it. You always think that. Because you're James Bond, the assassin who still fancies himself a Good Man, and you feel so very Good when you're able to keep your Word. That's what it's all about, with you and men like you. You should have listened when my father told you not to try and find me. Perhaps he phrased it as though leaving me undisturbed was for my own good more than it was for yours. Perhaps he made it sound like _taking care of me_ meant keeping me alive."

She smiles a smile now that's unlike any Bond has seen on her face before, and in that moment he knows without having to be told what her role in Spectre had been. The most recent head of the network lying exsanguinated at her feet is certainly a clue.

"Not many people know this, James," Madeleine says, and she steps down off her chair on to the floor, where the thick puddle of blood and dust almost looks like a velvety red carpet. "But the Pale King was not Franz, in the beginning. The name was useful—there were too many men like you who would see a young woman and assume she didn't know how to handle a gun, or a knife, or a business, on her own. Many of them never even knew they were working for me. But that is the beauty of standing behind the surveillance monitors. I saw all but was rarely seen myself."

"That seems a waste," Bond quips, but his witty comment falls on altogether the wrong ears. This unmasked Madeleine is icy and regal and he has fallen for absolutely all of her tricks. "The Pale Queen of Spectre," he murmurs, a little in awe despite himself. Her lipstick, he notices at the oddest of moments, is just the colour that stains her dress' hem. He has wiped this lipstick of his skin. He wonders now how much she wanted each smudge of it to be blood the night she put it there. "Why did you leave Spectre? It doesn't look like conscience was to blame."

"I got tired," she says simply. "Believe it or not, wrangling self-important people who may well not have respected me if they had seen my face was not preferable to settling on a beautiful mountaintop and being free."

"When you're tangled up with this life, you're never free."

"Well, you certainly wouldn't know. You've never even tried to be, James. But I suppose to an extent you are right; I knew what idiots controlled the world we live in, in my absence—just like Franz here. The news that he had had my father killed... well, I still don't know whether he meant it as a stab at me or as a gift—he has such a strange thing about murdering fathers. He, and god knows how many other narrow-minded, unstable people had _my_ power in their hands. You showed up and I could no longer put that knowledge out of my mind."

"So this is your way of letting me know that the Pale Queen is back."

"Oh, you'd have found that out one way or another. This is my way of letting you know that it's _all your fault_." Madeleine stands before him straight and tall, never leaning closer to give him the satisfaction of a more intimate whisper the way Bond has become somewhat accustomed to his adversaries and allies alike doing. She just looks at him, cold as a snowy peak too high for spring to thaw, and says, "You should have left my mountaintop alone."


End file.
